Telestike

Telestikē is the consecrating branch of theurgy: the art of preparing a material receptacle — above all a cult statue — so that a god may be present to it. The practitioner gathers the stones, herbs, scents, and characters that are the synthēmata of the god, and disposes them within and about the image; rightly composed, the statue becomes like a tuned instrument, and the divine illumination, which is everywhere offered, finds in it a fitted receiver.

Proclus, in his little treatise On the Hieratic Art, gives the classic rationale through the chains of sympathy: the lotus that opens with the sun, the cock that hails it, the heliotrope that turns to it are all solar tokens, and what nature does spontaneously the consecrator does by art, 'mingling many things into one' until the compound holds the god's signature entire. The Hermetic Asclepius makes the same claim for Egypt — that its temples knew how to draw souls of daimones into images — in a passage Augustine would famously attack; see the Hermetica.

The Neoplatonists were careful theologians of the rite: the god is not contained in the stone, Iamblichus insists, any more than the sun is contained in the eye; the statue is receptive, not captive. Telestikē is sympathy made liturgy — and the ancestor of the talismanic arts of the Renaissance magi.